Barbara Ourslerin: maid with silky hair (5 photos)

Only the object of eternal female pride did not adorn this girl’s pretty head. More precisely, not only her.





Barbara Ourslerin, covered from head to toe in soft blond hair, became famous throughout Europe in the 1660s. But the organizer of her success was her husband, who also became an agent.



Freak shows were popular entertainment in the Middle Ages. Disabled children were sold to circuses at birth or began to be shown for money from a very early age, as soon as their condition became obvious.

Barbara Ourslerin was born in the German village of Kempten in February 1629 and was sent by her parents on a tour of Europe. She "performed" in Copenhagen and London.

Barbara suffered from hypertrichosis, but at that time one not very smart doctor cruelly claimed that the girl was the product of an interspecies connection.





Danish physician Holger Jacobsen wrote in 1668: “The hairy maid must be the disgusting result of the copulation of a woman and a monkey.”

This nasty description is the last known mention of Barbara, who married and gave birth to a healthy child. The woman appears in many different texts written by authors from all over Europe.

In terms of intelligence, the girl was fine, judging by the fact that she played the harpsichord perfectly.

Author John Evelyn described her appearance after seeing her in London in 1657. This was his second time. The first was when the hairy woman was still a little eight-year-old girl.



Description preserved:

I saw a hairy maid, her eyebrows were combed up, and her entire forehead was as thick and smooth as can be found on any woman’s head. Two long curls protrude from each ear. She also had the longest beard and mustache, and long strands of hair grew from the very middle of her nose, just like a dog's.

The rest of her body is not that hairy. But compared to ordinary people, their hair is also very long. They cover the arms, neck, chest and back. The color is light brown, fine, like dressed linen... but otherwise she is very well built, plays the harpsichord well.

He paid an extra fee to watch the maid undress, and noted that the woman's back was covered with thick, soft hair, like a fur coat. Her breasts were round and white and less hairy than the rest of her skin.



Dissimilarity from the majority, otherness has always attracted people's attention. Regardless of time and era. The excessive and sometimes perverse interest in medical anomalies of the time meant that disabled people and others like Barbara were at risk of exploitation. Even after death. When “four-legged woman” Myrtle Corbin died, her family sealed off the burial site with cement to prevent grave robbers from digging up her body to sell to doctors fascinated by her skeletal structure.

In 1655, the hairy maid first came to London with her husband Johann Michael van Beek. Of course, you can convince yourself that appearance is not the main thing, and he fell in love with the girl for her beautiful soul and talents. But the realities are such that, according to surviving evidence, during a trip to France, Johann turned to the local bailiff for permission to demonstrate for money “a strange miracle of nature - a woman with a hairy, bearded face and a mustache.”

Barbara was only a dusty means of earning money, and the marriage was concluded solely to obtain money for demonstrating her ugliness. However, at that time the poor thing had no alternative. She was just a curiosity that her parents began to exploit, and her husband continued.

After visiting London in 1668, Barbara Ourslerin disappeared from radar. Considering her unique appearance, such a disappearance seems very strange. However, the story of her future life remained unknown.